Two weeks ago, as I was busy finding out in Vegas that double-shot frozen cocktails are a really stupid idea, a small Finnish startup unveiled their mobile operating system: Jolla unveiled Sailfish. With a strong focus on the Chinese market, the company is aiming to offer serious competition to Android's dominance of the smartphone market.

While Android in and of itself is open source, many of its important components, like the Google applications, as well as its services, such as the Play Store, are not.

Not it's not. Rule #1: If you can't compile a binary which works in at least one device from the source provided (aka without using any close-source software or binary blobs) , it's not open source. It's partially open source/mixed-model. Otherwise, any company that does partial source drops like the company that makes CrossOver can claim their product is open source.

Sorry, but lots of things are missing from Android, and it's not just drivers and Google's value added apps
(Play Store, Maps etc). Entire frameworks such as the GPS framework, the multimedia framework etc are missing.

Normally, a more rigid definition regarding whether a software product on sale is open source, would be the product sold (in Android's case, the product sold with the Nexus line) to fully correspond to the provided source, but Android doesn't even conform to the loose definition of open source, like the above.